Green Eyed Devil (Morally Questionable #2)

Chapter 1 Allegra

ALLEGRA

PRESENT DAY

The newspaper slides under my door around six in the morning, the same way it has every day for years.

Anonymously. Silently. As if I am a ghost still permitted to read about the living.

My hands tremble as I unfold it—not from weakness, though I have plenty of that—but because some days I still expect to see my own obituary printed there.

Instead, I see his.

Not quite. Not yet.

“Mafia-Linked Shooting at Underground Fight Leaves Two Dead, One Critically Injured.”

Rocco Agosti’s photograph glares up in glossy ink, his smirk embalmed like something sacred.

Flashes of his harsh words—my ex-father-in-law’s sermons of ownership and contempt—make my head tilt.

I’d always imagined myself doling out his punishment.

Now that he’s dead, I regret only that it wasn’t my hand that did it.

Then my eyes drop to the line beneath.

“Enzo Agosti among the injured. Condition unknown.”

The world narrows to a pulse. A slow, hard throb behind my sternum.

Enzo. My husband...

I sit back against the metal headboard. The cold bites my spine.

The paper crinkles in my hands.

Is he still my husband? Can that word hold when he tormented me, when he left me for dead and then moved on as if nothing had happened? When he has another woman by his side that he calls wife?

I take a deep breath, a tight, measured thing—because I will not drown in those memories today. Not when there is something to rejoice about.

Rocco is dead.

A smile crawls across my face. Relief tastes coppery on my tongue. Justice. At last. One name gone. The beginning of the end.

But Enzo—

For a fraction of a second, something twists inside me.

Not love. Not longing.

Something uglier: the ghost of his hands at my waist, his eyes darkening as if I were a sacred possession. The warmth of him at night—the kind of warmth a starving girl mistakes for love.

That girl died the night they took my life from me. She continued to die each year after, while my husband pretended the story moved on—that he moved on.

I fold the paper carefully, smoothing the crease with my palm.

“If he dies,” I whisper, low enough for only the room to hear, “let it not be merciful.”

If he dies, I want to see it. I want to know it was real. I want him to suffer the way I did.

If he lives—he lives to answer to me.

My eyes drop to the notebook on the bedside table. Five names. Five graves waiting for their owners.

My pen glides slow and deliberate through Rocco’s name. One clean stroke. Final.

I smile.

There is a kind of power in doing what no one believed you would live long enough to do.

Lia enters then, as she does every morning. My soft, loyal friend who carries the quiet fatigue of someone who’s cared for me for years.

“What’s put that look on your face, Miss?” she asks, sliding onto the chair by the bed.

“Rocco’s dead,” I say simply, handing her the paper.

She reads, hand flying to her mouth. “And—Signor Enzo… the paper says—”

“I saw.” My voice is flat.

I don’t add what I want to add—that I hope his blood painted the floor, that I hope his last breath rattled like mine did, that I hope his golden throne splintered. No need. Lia understands all too well what this means to me.

I close the notebook. There is work to do. A war to finish. A life to reclaim. I will do it all on my feet, even if I have to drag my broken body through fire to get there.

Almost five years. That is how long I have been languishing here, rotting in this bed for the convenience of other people.

For what? So greedy bastards could pad their ledgers? So my husband could get a new wife who overlooks all his infidelity? For my family to cash in on my absence?

My child is almost five, and the last time I saw him he was less than a week old. How is any of this fair?

Life had to beat me stupid before I understood: fairness does not run this world. Power does. Those who hold it define what counts as right.

They stole my life. They stole my child.

Weak as I still am, I cannot afford any mistakes.

Before I show myself again, I must become stronger.

I have already started physical therapy, forcing my limbs into obedience, pushing my body until the pain is familiar—so when the time comes to implement my plan, my body will not be the thing that betrays me.

I look at the list—four names uncrossed now—and the line of my mouth hardens. Their hour will come, and this time I will show no mercy.

It is funny, in a bitter way. I had judged Enzo for his ruthlessness, but the world keeps proving I cannot win without it. So I will change my tactics. I am going to become just as ruthless, if not more so.

They should have killed me when they had the chance. Now I am out for blood. I lost almost five years of my baby’s life, five years I will never get back.

And nothing cuts deeper than the knowledge he calls that woman mamma.